Unediting the Margin: Jonson, Marston, and the Theatrical Page

Abstract

The publication practices of early modern playwrights like John Marston or Ben Jonson have been widely misunderstood. Through these practices, dramatists did not attempt to distance their works from their theatrical origins, but rather intended to construct an alternative mode of theatricality, thereby reclaiming the visual as a positive force. Through a reconstruction of the relationships between those authors and their printers, and through analyses of their typographic strategies, the essay demonstrates how Jonson in particular made the book his theatre. What emerges is a narrative of Jonson's publishing activities that avoids the conventional, linear account: the playwright did not consistently seek to escape the theatre, but rather, after an initial attempt to associate his plays with classical drama and humanist scholarship, embarked on a decades‐long project of inventing a complex visual code of printed theatricality that culminated in the unfinished 1631 folio, and eventually collapsed, the same year, with the publication of The New Inn.

‘[<i>Overhearing</i>]’: Printing Parentheses and Reading Power in Ben Jonson’s <i>Sejanus</i>

“…11 If we take up Holger Syme's suggestion that an 'interest in print as a medium for performance can be traced in the typographic strategies Jonson and some of his contemporaries … devised for their plays', the 'deliberate unhelpfulness' Buckley detected in only a few marginal notes might in fact be a wider compositional strategy governing the play's print presentation in toto; an unhelpfulness which requires that a reader imagine the play in performance while, at the same time, frustrating that effort of imagination. 12 Broadly speaking, both Syme and Buckley direct their studies towards the verbal content of the earliest editions' paratextual apparatus (Buckley analyzes the play's marginal notes and compares them with those surrounding Matthew Gwinne's Nero, while Syme considers the effects of those notes being replaced with stage directions in the version of the play included in the 1616 Workes). 13 Both, too, argue overall that these processes of print presentation are aimed at fixing a reader's understanding of what is going on in the play.…”